HorrorScope wrote on Jan 15, 2015, 11:29:That is a lot of excuse masked as reasoning.

The game without the DLC is comically over priced to begin with and it goes down from there.

The industry hasn't changed a lot since L4D, if anything indie projects have grown. It wasn't that long ago, acts like it was 10 years ago.

Gamers will vote with wallets, we shall see.

Yeah 60 bucks for an online only update to L4D basically is ass. I thought this looked okay but they priced themselves into oblivion for me.

Yup, a $20 game at most, for $60, with $40 worth of DLC. I played the beta alpha maps a few times. So boring after an hour. There's just not enough game to make this worth $60. They'd have been better off doing free to play with premium DLC.

Creston wrote on Jan 13, 2015, 23:19:...And Anakin just going "Well shit, I'm confused, let me just go murder Jedi children because this dude who both Jedi Masters said was evil told me so."

That bothered me a lot, it was about as subtle as a Mack truck ramming into a pre-school.

'Anakin join the dark side.''Hmm, I'd never considered that before, OKAY! Point me towards the children I need to murder.'

Yeah, they didn't do a good job setting up his dark side. There was a scene from episode 1 had a scene where Anakin loses his temper and beats up someone. They cut it. And Christian Hayden was a poor choice for Anakin.

There are some set great pieces among the new trilogy, like the podrace, Darth Maul, the battle with Jango Fett, and the clones vs. droid battle, etc. But the stories over all are convoluted, both Anakin actors were poorly chosen, too much CG, Jar Jar, and Samuel L. Jackson was a distraction.

I'm in complete agreement with you guys, I'm just pointing out what Lucas has said in the past.

Yeah, there were some awesome scenes. The whole lightsaber fight with Qui-Gon, Obi Wan, and Darth Maul was awesome. The podrace was pretty cool. Some of the battle scenes were cool. Unfortunately, the underlying stories and characters were crap.

Julio wrote on Jan 9, 2015, 18:16:After reading the GameStop article, it's not surprising they were doing something shady. My RROD replacement 360 direct from Microsoft lasted a few days past the short warranty. Similar repair process I bet.

Yup, if you can fix something by heating it up enough to make solder flow, it's going to break the same way again. It's not a fix, it's a band-aid that has a cartoon fuck you written on it.

I can count on zero fingers the amount of time I've had hardware fail that murdered an entire system and I've been building my own machines since the mid-80s. Probably because I've never used a component that was the Chinese knockoff part equivalent of a Yugo.

Agent.X7 wrote on Jan 8, 2015, 14:44:I say this as a man who worked in IT for Lockheed Martin building, repairing, and maintaining PCs and laptops, it's not that I can't, it's that I won't.

If that is so, then you should already be familiar with the route that companies like Dell, HP, Asus, etc. take when building machines. If you're ok with overpaying for cheap, shitty parts that have very obviously failed well before their expected service life well, to quote you, "Good for you."

For a guy whose name is Burrito of Peace, you sure have an aggressive attitude.

Not exactly ringing endorsements for the quality and reliability of Alienware/Dell since both machines you purchased had total hardware failures.

Personally, I'll never buy a pre-built box. It never takes me more than 30 minutes to assemble the hardware and maybe another 5 minutes to get the OS and apps I want installed (WDS FTW!).

Yes, except hardware fails. It's a fact of life. I can't count the number of components I've had to replace in my PCs that I had to pay for because I built the PC myself. I had an Asus laptop literally start smoking 2 days after I purchased it.

As far as never buying a pre-built? Good for you. Not eveyone has the time or desire. I say this as a man who worked in IT for Lockheed Martin building, repairing, and maintaining PCs and laptops, so it's not that I can't, it's that I won't.

Cutter wrote on Jan 7, 2015, 20:25:How Smed is not gone yet boggles the mind. They should have shitcanned him a decade ago.

Because aside from Playstation, SOE is one of Sony's most profitable divisions? (Aside from the 6.2billion yen they wrote off last year to develop Everquest Next.) Their TV division has been hemorrhaging money so bad for the past decade that they spun it off into its own company. The mobile division is a money sink, and the PC division did so badly that they took a huge hit just to shitcan the whole thing last year.

RaZ0r! wrote on Jan 7, 2015, 19:28:I really wouldn't put too much stock in the word of some low rent PC assembler.

I took the plunge last year and purchased an Origin PC (with many discounts) and I haven't been upset at all.

After 25+ years building PCs, there comes a time where you just want to piece together a system and have it work without fiddling, so I bit the bullet. I know it's a cardinal sin to purchase pre-builds, but in this case it was well worth it, and in the end I came out about 600-700 cheaper than if I were to piecemeal my own system together with the same hardware.

You did? How the heck did that happen?

I always think I'm going to have someone else build them, and it's NEVER worth it financially. It's always 300-400 bucks cheaper to get the parts.

That's why I started getting Alienware when I went back to school. I just didn't have time to fix things, and the warranty covered everything. With the bulk discounts they get on hardware, if you wait for a sale you can get a pre-built system with a good warranty for close to what you'd pay to put it together. You just have to know how to get past the level one "support" people in India to get real help. IN my case, I had a faulty mobo fry pretty much everything in my case. NVidia 590, Intel i7 2600K, etc. Covered it all and sent a tech to put it in for me. If I built it dollars to donuts I would have had to pay to replace everything. My laptop fried too, and same deal. Replaced everything. I had a boot issue with my newest desktop and they upgraded my Intel i7 from a 3930K to a 4930K for free.

xXBatmanXx wrote on Jan 3, 2015, 22:20:With all of the great video games available, and most for less, I can't believe they are trying to push Evolve for 60!!! What a joke. And what moron at the company thought Dying Light (a Dead Island clone) thought it would be a good idea to come out on GTA5 day!?

Evolve is like a bad mod. I can't believe they think it's worth the same price as GTA V or any other game, really. Limited maps and gameplay. Left 4 Dead and the sequel did well because they WERE NOT 60 FUCKING DOLLARS! I sure wouldn't have purchased them if they were.

jdreyer wrote on Dec 31, 2014, 13:24:That curved monitor looks pretty sweet. I'm looking to get a 21:9 monitor. I want IPS, 120 MHz refresh rate, and at least 1440P. Right now, the only one I found is $1000. So gotta wait for prices to come down a lot. Hopefully other companies will jump on the bandwagon.

I have a 21:9 Dell Ultrasharp monitor that I love. 29" and 2560x1080. Battlefield 4, GW2, and WoW are native and they rock. The bad is that a lot of games don't support ultrawide resolutions. They say they do, but then the menus are all messed up or off the damn screen, or the HUD is in the center of the screen and not on the sides, etc. Diablo III doesn't support this res, but you can simply play it in a full screen window and it works.

As far as curved screens for gaming: Have you even tried it? One of our local warehouse stores has one set up with a PS4. Awesome.

xXBatmanXx wrote on Dec 30, 2014, 19:34:Still love my Kindle Fire, but I read a lot....so......

Yup. Use a Kindle Paperwhite for reading. Use a Samsung Galaxy Pro 12.2 (Got myself for Christmas) to play Hearthstone, watch Amazon Prime, and look up things online while sitting on the couch watching movies or whatever. I also use it to write as I have a Logitech keyboard/case thing on it. Also, it works as a wireless keyboard for my XBone so I don't have to do the annoying joystick letter find when trying to message someone or put in passwords. I do most of my heavy computing at my desk on my gaming PC. (During which my tablet functions as a second screen to look up WoW bosses or whatever.)

The thing I don't use anymore is my laptop. It's too big and heavy for using on the couch without some type of lap desk, it takes too long to boot just to look up an actor on IMDB (or it's too loud and power hungry to leave on), and it's just all around a big old dust collector right now. Granted it's an 18 inch, SLI'd monster of a gaming laptop, but I also detest my wife's Macbook Air too. (Or whatever it's called.)